Trump’s Legal Team Shrinks as He Rejects Two New Hires

Trump photographed meeting with Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull on February 23rd.

By Cheriss May/NurPhoto/Getty Images.

As he plunged the White House into fresh chaos following a series of staffing upheavals last week, Donald Trump took equal liberties with the team of lawyers constructing his defense in Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. As the Hive’s Gabriel Shermanreported, Trump “hit the roof” when Mueller subpoenaed Trump Organization records, and pressured top lawyer John Dowd—who had so far advocated for a get-along approach—to resign. (In a statement to The New York Times, Dowd said he wished the president “the best of luck.”) In Dowd’s place, Trump was said to have hired combative former U.S. attorney Joe diGenova and his wife, Victoria Toensing, signaling his desire to take a more aggressive stance against Mueller. But on Sunday, the White House revealed that diGenova and Toensing would not be joining Trump’s legal team.

According to sources who spoke to the Times, Trump met with diGenova and Toensing, and did not believe he had sufficient “personal chemistry” with either. “The president is disappointed that conflicts prevent Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing from joining the president’s special counsel legal team,” Trump’s personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow, said in a statement. “However, those conflicts do not prevent them from assisting the president in other legal matters. The president looks forward to working with them.”

Per the Times, the “conflict” referred to by Sekulow may concern Toensing’s representation of Mark Corallo, who was a spokesman for Trump’s legal team in 2017, and who has told investigators that he believes Hope Hicks may have planned to obstruct justice when news broke of Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian official. (Hicks’s lawyer has denied this.) However, Corallo told the Los Angeles Times that he’d signed a waiver on Monday, when Toensing’s firm first started discussing working for Trump. “There were no conflicts as I could see them,” he said.

The announcement that diGenova and Toensing would not be joining the team came just hours after Trump tweeted early Sunday morning that he was having no trouble building up his legal defenses.